Republic of Korea

Republic of Korea has made efforts In the OA arena for about a decade now. Korea Education & Research Information Service digital archive repository named 'dCollection' was made available in 2003. Besides dCollection, the other notable repositories in service are, Korean Research Memory (KRM), created by the National Research Foundation, Society Village and National Science & Technology Information Service (NTIS), offered by Korea Institute of Science and Technology Institution (KISTI).

At present there are 28 repositories that disseminate the scholarly contents of institutions and universities (OpenDOAR). 49 journals from the Republic of Korea are published as open access and indexed in the Directory of Open Access journals (DOAJ). As the Korean research output and global collaboration is growing rapidly. With widespread Internet connection and online facilities, Korean Government has established Open Access Korea flagship initiative. Under this programme, various outreach initiatives are planned such as Open Access Week, OAK Publishing and Repositories. Korea had initiated projects such as Online Archiving & Searching Internet Sources and Dublin Core Korean initiative to architect the technical infrastructure for open source platforms.

Enabling Environment

IPLeft, a social group for information commons in Korean Republic launched the Korean Open Access Licence (KOAL) in October, 2004 to facilitate free use of information as a new model of open access to information. CreativeCommons Korea promotes the licensing of open content which would augur well for open access resources reuse. The country has an excellent ICT infrastructure and expertise which boosts Open Access in the country.

Potential Barriers

Although technology architecture and software platforms are well developed along the repositories growth, deposition of content in the repositories is found to be relatively low. Organizational structures, marketing and publicity of repositories, building nationwide OA consensus, should be aligned with budgets and policies to bring about the required change to open access movement.

Funding Mandate

There is currently no national OA policy in place. ROARMAP and SHERPA/JULIET databases have registered zero institutional/ funders' OA policies from the Republic of Korea.

List of Publications

You, Jong-Sung; Transition from a Limited Access Order to an Open Access Order: The Case of South Korea